The Ever After

by Amanda Hocking

  “Sorry, a white elk heart,” he said, as a spider languidly crawled across his eyeball. “Is the heart white or is it the heart of a white elk?”

  It was so hot, the spiders started to burst into flames. The tinier arthropods on the floor were popping like popcorn all around me, and all I could do was scream.

  42

  Manipulations

  I was screaming into the ice water, then I surfaced, gasping for air, and Pan was kneeling beside the metal tub.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Let her breathe, Pan,” Elof said, and I saw him standing just behind Pan.

  “Did I get too hot?” I asked.

  Pan nodded. “Heat was radiating off your body, and then you started to scream, so I dumped you in the ice bath.”

  “Do you remember anything?” Elof asked me.

  “I think. Sorta.” I looked over to the Ögonen, staring placidly at me. “They implanted something.”

  “What do you mean?” Pan asked.

  “Spiders. They filled a room in the dungeon with spiders and then the spiders burst into flames.” My teeth started to chatter, so Pan took my hand and helped me out of the tub.

  “How do you know that didn’t really happen?” Elof asked. “That it wasn’t some kind of bizarre torture by the Älvolk?”

  Pan handed me a towel and I wrapped it around my shoulders.

  I shook my head adamantly. “No. The Ögonen used spiders to scare me before.” I glanced over at Pan, thinking of the moment he’d confessed he loved me—a moment he no longer remembered. “And Pan was there, and he started acting strange when the spiders showed up.”

  I dried my face with the towel, and I looked up to Ur the Ögonen. “Why did you do that? Why did you infiltrate my memories?”

  Ur blinked at me, then looked to Elof.

  “What are they saying?” I asked Elof.

  “Nothing to me.” Elof shook his head. “Ur, we thank you for your help, but if you wish not to converse with us in whatever way you can, perhaps it’s best if you go.”

  Ur blinked and then walked out of the lab. Though they were gone, that didn’t mean they couldn’t still read my thoughts from far away. I shivered again, thinking of the spiders covering Pan’s face.

  “What did you remember?” Pan asked.

  “We were left alone, by accident, I think,” I said, and I’d already decided that I was going to skip over all the kissing bits—at least until Elof wasn’t around. “Just me and Pan. And you asked me what Indu was doing with me, and I told you about the documents I translated for him. Some kind of gross blood pudding recipe with an elk heart as an ingredient. You called the Älvolk cannibals.”

  “Shit,” Pan said. “Do you remember anything else?”

  “That’s when it was overrun with spiders and fire.” I chewed my lip. “I have to remember what I translated for Indu.”

  “You can’t do that again with the Ögonen,” Pan said. “You weren’t under that long before you got way too hot. It’s not safe.”

  “I’ll never do that with an Ögonen again,” I said definitively. “I can’t trust what they show me.”

  “Maybe you can’t completely trust anything you see when someone else is digging around in your head,” Pan said. He leaned against the island; his button-up was wet on the rolled-up sleeves and chest, so the fabric stuck to his muscles.

  “I can trust Sunniva Kroner,” I said.

  “That’s the younger woman who does the aural healing back in Förening?” Elof asked.

  I nodded. “She’s been working on her healing since I’ve been gone. I’m sure she’s made progress by now.”

  “That’s a bit of a leap, don’t you think?” Pan asked, not unkindly.

  “Fine. I’ll call Finn before I go back and get the scoop.”

  “Whoa, what?” He straightened up. “You say that like going back to Förening is a sure thing.”

  “I have to get these memories back,” I insisted. “There’s something in those translations, and I have no clue what it is. But since they let us go, I must’ve figured it out, which means that the Älvolk know what it is. They stole blood from me and my sister for it. We need to know the truth.”

  “I’m not arguing with that,” Pan said. “I just don’t think it’s worth you dying to find out. Are you sure that you can trust Sunniva Kroner? Not to muck around in your brain and not to go further than your body can handle?”

  “Her brother is one of Finn’s oldest and most trusted friends, and Finn is the most honorable man I know,” I said. “Tove is doing this with Sunniva.”

  He was silent, considering it. “They wouldn’t let you do it if it wasn’t safe?”

  “No, Finn definitely would not,” I said, and he let out a relieved sigh, his fears temporarily placated.

  “When did the spiders appear in your memory?” Elof asked.

  He pulled up a stool and had a seat. I was still standing, alternating between my feet, because I didn’t want to sit. I felt too antsy, and my skin had a sunburnt feel to it, so any touch burned a little.

  “It was right before Pan started asking me about the translations,” I said.

  “What had you been doing before he asked you about that?” Elof pressed.

  My cheeks burned, and I mumbled, “Like … kissing.”

  “Ah, understood,” Elof said.

  Pan cleared his throat. “What did the spiders do?”

  “Crawled around.” I shrugged. “They swarmed the room.”

  “Maybe they were meant to highlight something?” Elof asked.

  “But … they ruined the memory.” I frowned. “I was panicked and I didn’t understand at all what memory-Pan was saying, because I couldn’t recall what my half of the conversation had been.” I shook my head. “I need to get to Sunniva and get the rest of my memory back.”

  “Well, before you head out, let me do a quick checkup to make sure that there wasn’t any serious damage done,” Elof said.

  He checked a few things—my heart rate, blood pressure, pupils, reflexes—and then he cleared me to go. Pan walked me home, and he stayed long enough to be interrogated by Dagny while I had my phone call with Finn.

  The verdict from Finn was that Tove and Sunniva had made significant progress, and he thought it might be time for me to come back to Förening.

  “So it’s settled then, isn’t it?” Pan asked, once I finished summarizing the phone call. “You’re going to Minnesota.”

  I nodded. “It’s where I need to be.”

  “It’s where I need to be too!” Eliana piped up, and she threw one arm around my shoulders. “With Hanna and my sister.”

  43

  Worldly

  Pan slid open the barn-style door on his friend Hugo Rohm’s garage. Hugo worked with him as a peurojen, and he fixed cars on the side. Over the summer, he’d been very slowly working on the Jeep that Finn had lent me to drive to Merellä from Förening. It was from the Trylle kingdom’s fleet, and Eliana had crashed through the fabric top when I first arrived at the citadel.

  Hugo had stopped working on it while we’d been busy, because he wasn’t sure what to do with it, and that had slowed his progress. But he’d gotten it all fixed up in time for me to drive back to Förening.

  The bright mojito green Jeep Wrangler was dusty, but otherwise it looked good as new. The canvas canopy was shiny and intact, and the scratches in the paint were gone.

  “This looks really great,” I said as Pan and I inspected the Jeep. “Thanks again. How much do I owe you?”

  “Two hundred and fifty dollars.” Hugo stood beside us, half leaning on the vehicle. Grease stained his white shirt, his dark brown hair tangled curls that landed just above his jaw.

  I hid my wince as I pulled the cash out of my bag. It really wasn’t a bad price, but that was 250 fewer dollars that I had to fund my two-day road trip to Minnesota. I wasn’t flat broke yet, but my savings were very, very scant.

  That was another reason I had to get back
to Förening. I wanted to ask Finn and Mia for a small loan. Just something until I could get a paying job again. When I’d lived with the Tulins, I’d worked at the inn, and when I lived with Finn and Mia, I helped watch the kids (and cook and clean) for ten-plus hours a day.

  So I was used to working, and I hadn’t been sitting idly. Dealing with the fallout of being captive in another kingdom took time, and it felt like I was so close to understanding and remembering what had happened to me.

  I might have to spend every penny I had, but it would be worth it to know the truth and to stop something terrible from happening. And then I could move on. Decide where to live and find a job. And spend quality time with Pan.

  After I paid Hugo, he gave me the keys to the Jeep, and Pan and I got in and began the short drive back to the apartment.

  “I wish I was going with you,” Pan said quietly.

  Yesterday, when I’d been making the plans, we’d decided it was best if he stayed back. Eliana insisted on going, and we all thought that Jem and Sumi shouldn’t be separated from her. With the four of us, that was basically a carload. Plus, Pan had been missing a lot of work, and he was needed here.

  Dagny and Elof were continuing their research into what was wrong with Eliana, what the Älvolk were up to, and how to recover our memories safely, and Pan could help them with that. It all made sense, and he understood and agreed with all of it.

  But that didn’t really do anything about this trepidation. I knew that Pan was nervous that something bad might happen with Sunniva and the memory recovery, and he didn’t completely trust Jem-Kruk and Sumi.

  Those are the things he’d told me, when he voiced his concerns the previous day. But I also suspected there was another silent fear lurking under everything: the fear that I wouldn’t come back. That I would go to Förening and stay, the way Rikky had done before.

  That was the only way I could explain the way Pan kissed me after we said our goodbyes. Jem and Sumi had put the last of their things—they only had a few bags between the three of them—in the back of the Jeep while Eliana hugged Dagny.

  “I’ll call you when I get there,” I told him as we stood by the driver’s side door in the warm morning sun.

  And then suddenly, he grabbed me, pulling me to him, and he kissed me fiercely, deeply. It stole my breath away and made my knees weak. Fortunately, his arm around me stopped me from going full swoon.

  When we stopped kissing, he rested his forehead against mine and breathed in deeply. “Come back to me, Ulla, safe and sound.”

  “I’ll always come back to you,” I promised him.

  I hadn’t told him what I’d seen in the memory—the two of us saying “I love you” to each other—or that I knew I loved him still. Just before I left didn’t seem like the right time, especially when we hardly had a moment alone.

  So with that goodbye, I got in the Jeep and got on the road. Things took a bumpy turn right at the start, with Eliana and Sumi getting into a heated debate about what music to listen to, but they finally shut up when I put on Queen.

  The drive was supposed to be split between two days, with us ending up in Bozeman, Montana, very late the first night, if we stayed on track, but Eliana was dead set against keeping to our schedule. She was an exuberant tourist. Everything that even remotely counted as sightseeing—including a very, very large tree and a woman giving away puppies at a gas station—she wanted to stop for.

  When we were through a long, open stretch of road, she yelped in the back seat and slapped the window with the palm of her hand. “Look at them!”

  I slammed on the brakes, only to see the danger Eliana was alerting me to was half a mile away. A pack of six silvery gray wolves raced through a grassy field that ran alongside a twisting shallow river.

  Since the vehicle had stopped moving, Eliana opened the door and dove out.

  “Eliana!” I shouted, and I turned the Jeep off, since there wasn’t another car around for miles.

  “Ellie, don’t go near them!” Jem warned as he slid out of the back seat after her. “They look dangerous!”

  “I won’t!” she yelled, but she jogged a few more feet before stopping.

  Some of the wolves stopped, apprehensively looking our way, but the rest kept on running.

  “Stay back!” I told Jem and Sumi, since I was probably the strongest one, and I didn’t want the wolves getting spooked. They were close enough and big enough that they could do real damage if they decided to attack.

  Eliana stayed still, her hair shimmering golden brown in the evening sun, and a cool breeze blew through the nearby evergreens and over the river, ruffling the wolves’ fur. One giant canine looked like it was holding Eliana’s gaze with his golden amber eyes.

  I walked slowly behind her and grabbed her arm. “Eliana, come on.”

  “They won’t hurt me,” she said, and didn’t budge.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do,” she insisted, then looked up at me. “Be still, Ulla. Enjoy the moment.”

  I sighed and didn’t let go of her arm, but I also didn’t throw her over my shoulder and carry her back to the Jeep. Compromise.

  The wolf kept looking at her, until another wolf howled somewhere in the distance. Then he cocked his ear and took off with the rest of his pack.

  “Thank you,” Eliana said quietly as she watched the retreating canines. “I know we’re in a hurry, so thank you for letting me have this moment. They were stunning creatures, and I want to see as much of this world as possible while I can.”

  “Well, I’m glad you got to enjoy this,” I said, softening. Another five minutes wouldn’t destroy our timetable. “But you can’t scream and jump out of a vehicle. You have to ask and wait for me to pull over.”

  “I understand,” she said with a wistful smile. “I knew this would be special, though.” Suddenly, she whirled around and hugged me. “I’m so happy that you’re here. I always wanted a sister.”

  “You have a twin sister,” I reminded her.

  “That doesn’t count. She’s not like you.” She released me and frowned. “She can’t love.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “She didn’t love me.”

  “Has the danger passed?” Sumi asked as she walked up behind us.

  I nodded and glanced back at her, her lovely long coils of hair hanging past her shoulders. Her loose tank top and tight leather pants made her look like a boho rock star, like an olive-skinned Janis Joplin.

  “The wolves are gone.” I pointed to the trees they’d disappeared in, about a hundred meters away.

  “They didn’t seem so dangerous,” Jem said as he joined us. “Our kuguars are twice that big back home.”

  “Were you hoping to end the day with a mauling?” Sumi asked him wryly.

  He laughed. “I suppose not.” He breathed in deeply. “It is lovely here. The sunsets remind me of home.”

  “Maybe that’s why I like them so much,” Eliana said as she stared at the pink sunset.

  “The good news is that we can enjoy them from the car,” I said, and started back that way.

  44

  Whimsical

  After the second grueling day of fifteen-plus hours on the road, we finally arrived in Förening at nearly midnight.

  Following the winding roads on the top of the bluff along the Mississippi River, we passed through a metal gate after a guard waved us through. Förening was a lush green town, with many cottages both quaint and chic hidden deep among the trees. Over five thousand trolls lived here, but the streets were quiet, with only hints of life visible through the branches—a swing set, smoke from a chimney, a bleating goat.

  The place where we were staying was an inn on the north side of town called the Wisteria & Whimsy Bed & Breakfast. It was the smaller of the two hotels in town, but the other was more expensive and extravagant, catering to visiting dignitaries, traveling Markis and Marksinna, and friends of the royal family.

  Wisteria & Whimsy
Bed & Breakfast had gone with a more fairy-tale, cutesy approach. From the outside it was positively charming, with a curved roof and lavender flowers hanging from the thick vines covering the stone walls. The flower gardens in the yard were practically overgrown, with cheery little gnome statues hidden around. It was dark out, but little lights scattered through the front gardens made it rather bright.

  Inside was more of the same whimsical décor. Pastel walls and a curved front desk greeted us. The woman working the desk was someone I knew from around town, Birdie Vinstock. She was plump and lovely, with an energetic smile, even when the ornate grandfather clock behind her was ticking even closer to midnight.

  She gave us our keys—big brass keys with butterfly room numbers on the key rings—and directed us to our rooms on the third floor. As we checked in, she told us about the communal washrooms and complimentary breakfast of appleberry scones and green tea.

  Each room had two narrow beds, and Eliana called dibs on bunking with me. That was probably my preferred sleeping arrangement anyway. Our room was small and lavender, with elaborate paintings of fairies on the walls and an overabundance of pillows on the small beds.

  I was exhausted and just wanted to sleep, but Eliana once again had other plans.

  “I can’t sleep,” she announced after we’d been in bed for all of five minutes.

  “You haven’t even tried,” I said, and snuggled deeper into the pillows.

  “I just can’t believe I’ll see Hanna in the morning,” she said, barely containing her excitement.

  Finn and Mia already had a houseful, and I didn’t really think they could squeeze the four of us in. I’d considered staying with them, but I knew that both Eliana and Hanna would be hurt if I stayed and Eliana couldn’t. So it was better this way.

  “Do you think she’ll remember me?” Eliana asked softly.

  “Yeah, of course. You weren’t apart that long. And you’ve talked to her on the phone.”

  “Well, both you and I forgot a lot of things, and it happened all at once. One day we knew things, the next we didn’t.”